Look around your office. Do you know what your printers are doing? Do you know how much they’re getting used? Do you know who uses them? If someone tried to steal documents from your printer, would they get away with it?
Most people don’t think about their printers too often. However, these are questions every company should consider at some point. If you are going to get control of your printing costs and manage your printers like any other IT resource, it’s time for a print audit.
EVERYTHING PRINT
An accurate print audit starts with analyzing and auditing the current printer fleet, helping you understand how your current print environment is operating. However, a proper print audit is not limited to printers. Additional devices such as scanners, multifunction devices, plotters and more all need to be analyzed to gather an accurate overview. The assessment is then followed by developing a strategy and plan to reduce your current volume and costs, which leads to a plan of action.
So, what should you really be getting out of a print audit? Most businesses probably have a rough figure for the number of printed pages they are currently generating or what their print environment is costing them annually. But it takes a lot of time and expertise to inventory your devices, analyze the related cost of each device and understand whether what you are paying is reasonable. If done properly, a print audit can identify opportunities to redeploy your print devices, reduce costs and improve productivity.
YOUR PRINTER FLEET AT A GLANCE
A professional print assessment or audit will tell you the scale of your current print environment and how it is currently structured. It should be able to identify red flags or inefficiencies within the print environment. For example, an audit will be able to tell you:
- How many devices are being used?
- Are they the right ones for your offices?
- What is the life left on your current fleet?
- How many vendors and contracts do you have?
- How many devices are owned and how many are leased?
- What are your consumable costs?
- What is the average monthly volume of your current devices?
- What is the volume of color printing versus black and white?
PLAN OF ACTION
An audit will make it possible to create a plan for optimizing your printer fleet. It should be a roadmap that will outline how your print environment should look and how you can get there. These findings will give your organization a strategy to reduce volumes in departments or business areas within your company.
For example, print software can be put in place to limit waste and to control user behavior. With the right controls, costs can be reduced and a plan to remove out of date devices can present you with immediate cost savings. Ongoing management can identify areas where print costs can be driven down over time as more efficient machines come online and user behaviors slowly change.
THE CHANGE IS COMING
It is important to note that a print environment requires ongoing management to drive your print reduction strategy. An audit or analysis of your current print environment provides you with a plan to drive your strategy, but if not implemented correctly, the exercise could be useless. Appointing a managed print partner and outsourcing this function is important, as industry experts are driven and incentivised to continually optimize your printer fleet. They can help you develop and maintain a project plan to identify priorities, maintain timelines and deliver new devices and software solutions.
In most cases, when an assessment is done in a print environment, savings are significant and can be as much as 30%. Combine those savings with an independent management partner to drive the strategy continuously, and you will be able to save money on your IT budget, increase efficiency and productivity, and enjoy a high-quality end-user experience within your business.
If you would like one of our business analysts to contact you to set up a free audit of your print networks to find out if your environment is optimized, efficient and sustainable, contact us today.
